Biomarkers and Mental Illness

Employing accessible language throughout, this book covers the history of psychiatric research, the current state-of-the art in psychiatric practice, the physiological systems affected by psychiatric illnesses, the whole-body nature of these diseases and the impact that this aspect has on emerging biomarker discoveries.

Further, it provides descriptions of the major specific psychiatric disorders and the special challenges regarding the diagnosis and treatment of each. The book concludes with insights into the latest developments in hand-held biomarker test devices, which can provide diagnostic information in less than 15 minutes in point-of-care settings.

This book investigates the emerging use of biomarkers in the study of psychiatric diseases, a topic of considerable importance for a broad range of people including researchers, clinicians, psychiatrists, university students and even those whose lives are affected in some way by a psychiatric illness. The last category is hardly trivial, since a staggering one in three people worldwide show the criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder at some point in their lifetime.

Paul Guest, PhD has over 25 years of experience in academic and pharmaceutical company environments in designing, carrying out and documenting all aspects of pre-clinical and clinical studies with a focus on psychiatric disorders, metabolic disorders and stem cell therapeutics. He possesses a diverse set of skills in genomic/proteomic areas including immunological, protein-protein interactions, detection technologies, robotics, functional assays and bioinformatic analyses. He has published more than 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals and contributed over 20 chapters to various contributed volumes.

Part I.- CHAPTER 1 Psychiatric disorders as whole body diseases.- CHAPTER 2 Treatment of psychiatric disorders: time for a paradigm change?.- CHAPTER 3 The importance of biomarkers: the required tools of the trade.- Part II.- CHAPTER 4 Schizophrenia and the mind-body connection.- CHAPTER 5 Progress for better treatment of depression.- CHAPTER 6 - The special case of bipolar disorder.- CHAPTER 7 The worrying case of anxiety and stress-related disorders.- CHAPTER 8 - The autism spectrum conditions and the extreme male brain syndrome.- CHAPTER 9 Gender and psychiatric disorders.- Part III.- CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 10 - Biomarkers and new treatments for Alzheimers disease.- CHAPTER 11 Parkinsons disease, biomarkers and beyond.- Part IV.- CHAPTER 12 The future: towards personalized medicine.